Tim Heijermans

Where does real spiritual fruit come from? The charismatic movement, launched in the 1960s, argued that fruit came from a special "second-blessing experience", attested by so-called “speaking in tongues”. The movement spread to major the Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and other churches around the world.

We’ve taken a backwards look at the long slide from orthodox Christianity to Roman sacramentalism to Protestantism to liberalism to fundamentalism to the new evangelicalism. The twentieth century was destined to birth another movement as the child of her departure from the authority of the Bible.

In our attempt to trace how CCC in Luxembourg fits into today’s theological currents, we come to the rather elusive label “evangelical”. What does that mean? Who can legitimately call himself an evangelical? To get our arms around that question we’ll have to turn the clock back a generation or two. And we’ll have to look at the very different ways this word has been used in Europe and the United States.

Fundamentalism -- now there’s a dirty word for you! Today to be a fundamentalist is to be noted for violence, blinkered narrow-mindedness, intolerance, naive commitment to literal interpretation of ancient (read “outdated”) religious documents . . . in short, all the politically incorrect attitudes that secular western society despises.